Excellent review of #Thought Leadership Tweet by Craig Pearce

Craig Pearce is a well known PR blogger in Australia and anyone who hasn’t read his PR blog should.  Its full of interesting and informative views on a broad range of PR topics.  He has penned this review on his blog of #Thought Leadership Tweet 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership program. 

Thought leadership is a strategic approach to business communication which helps organisations positively position and differentiate themselves, in the process creating and enhancing relationships with key stakeholders. It contributes to excellent organisational reputation and the achieving of organisational objectives, including selling products and services.

It is one of the first approaches public relations professionals should consider as part of their communication arsenal. And as anyone who is inquisitive about public relations and/or is committed to continual professional development will tell you, the musings of experienced corporate communicator Craig Badings on his Thought Leadership blog are required and compelling reading.

Craig and Dr Liz Alexander have just published a fascinating, thought provoking and eminently practical e-book entitled 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign, which as the title implies contains a series of tweetable insights into the practice of thought leadership.

The e-book also provides additional perspective and context to assist in applying thought leadership as well as referencing a range of resources to help kick your brain into gear, increase the potency of your thinking on the discipline and help achieve the best results possible.

Such is the depth of information in this e-book, a single post discussing it will not do it justice, but some of the many aspects I found interesting are highlighted below.

The culture of thought leadership

Like CSR, thought leadership needs to be built-in, not bolt-on. As thought leadership is about providing perspectives and insights different (i.e. leading the way) to competitors, it makes sense for content/platforms to reflect the innovation and point of difference an organisation offers.

It will be difficult for organisations that do not behave in an innovative manner to think outside the square, or to at the very least seek to expand the boundaries of the square, which is essentially what thought leadership entails.

Conversely, the tail wagging the dog is a well-known means of instigating change! If it takes a communication program to help galvanise an organisation into behaving differently, perhaps by seeing the impact a thought leadership campaign or approach can have, then why not!

Too often organisations (and public relations practitioners for that matter) rely on a crisis to help change organisational culture and behaviour. Why rely on bad news or bad things happening to motivate organisational evolution?

As Craig and Liz point out, thought leadership takes bravery to instigate as it sometimes means sticking your neck out, challenging orthodoxies. In pure business action, Henry Ford did it; Richard Branson did and does it; Dick Smith did and does it – and look at them.

Preparation and thinking for thought leadership

Craig and Liz hit on one of the biggest bugbears of the practice of public relations when they point out allowing time to think (and by extension, prepare) is a critically important element of thought leadership. Too often communication programs are undertaken without sufficient thought being put into them.

Whether it is the fault of the organisation/client or the PR practitioner, this is a risk-laden approach. And especially so with thought leadership.

Here are some steps to thought leadership that take time to get right:

• Understanding what thought leadership positions       competitors inhabit
• Determining what the most productive thought leadership       platforms are your organisation can inhabit
• Identifying thought leadership business objectives and       putting in place mechanisms to measure the impact of the campaign
• Deciding – is this a campaign (e.g. does it have a       limited lifespan) or is this a way of life (e.g. is the thought       leadership program so embedded into, and driven by, organisational       culture its intent is to continue and evolve on an ongoing basis?).

Listening in thought leadership public relations

It’s interesting the term ‘public relations’ doesn’t appear in the e-book narrative itself. Yet thought leadership is clearly a PR 101 strategic approach.

Why are Craig and Liz shy about flagging this? I bet it’s so as not to marginalise thought leadership in a perceived PR ‘ghetto’. This is somewhat of a shame as it’s reflective of a malaise within PR not to shout out the business relevance and potency of the discipline, but such is life.

Certainly, I can’t see how any other business discipline can lay claim to managing the approach effectively. Not marketing, that’s for sure.

One reason why PR is the only business discipline to practice thought leadership is because, as Craig and Liz imply, listening is an important aspect of not just thought leadership, but any communication strategy. This is to help understand the needs, wants and issues of stakeholders, then to help identify opportunities and threats relevant to stakeholder relationship enhancing.

(Or I guess we could call it stakeholder relations, which as I’ve written previously is simply a self-hating term for PR that we as practitioners have Harry Pottered up out of our shame in working in PR…or so it seems.)

One manifestation of listening is undertaking market research, and whilst there are inexpensive means of undertaking market research, other approaches include media and internet scanning, conversations with key stakeholders (including influencers over target audiences) and undertaking internal reviews with employees to gather intelligence from them as to what turns organisational stakeholders on…and off.

The fear of thought leadership

A fair criticism of thought leadership is it gives up organisational intellectual property other organisations can leverage to position themselves favourably. The IP can also give potential clients a resource for free that otherwise they would have paid for.

These comments are both true, so thought must clearly be given to the specific thought leadership platforms and what aspects of the platforms organisations will give up information on.

It is vital to remember that in an internet age it is increasingly expected organisations will give up information for free (an inbound marketing approach). This is partially because it has been proven the viral impact of sharing useful information positively impacts on organisational reputation and business results.

These results are equally relevant to the B2C and B2B environments, as well as a third paradigm I like to call B2Community.  This third paradigm is relevant in communicating with target audiences who are not necessarily going to buy a product or service. Examples are ratepayers in a local government area, or residents near large parklands or close to schools.

I have merely dipped a toe into the water of 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign and plan on returning to it in the future. What did you think about aspects of thought leadership and its salient issues discussed in this post? Can you give examples of effective and failed thought leadership programs? Do you have any insights and recommendations to share?

#Thought Leadership Tweet – what’s your communication strategy?

The way you take your thought leadership to market is critical.

Taking your thought leadership campaign to market is the final chapter in the book #Thought Leadership Tweet 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign.  You may have the best thought leadership campaign in the world but if you don’t communicate it effectively to your desired audiences you’re going to waste a lot of valuable resources and your campaign will fail.

To overcome this, research is critical.  I refer to Tweet no 107: “Have you researched what your clients read and where they source their information so you can tailor your thought leadership accordingly.

Building a thought leadership platform is a long-term program. As such you need to be sure that you are packaging and reaching your audience where they are consuming their content.  Someone who heads up the thought leadership program for a multi-national once told me:  “We’ve researched our audience and they tell us they don’t want long reports, they want pithy, executive summaries and time with senior partners to talk through their issues.”

The tweet outline in this chapter will guide you to coming up with the best possible communication strategy for your campaign.

Internal and external thought leadership communication drivers

One of the aspects so often overlooked in a thought leadership communication strategy is how you work with your employees to ensure they become your best advocates for the campaign.  As tweet no 111 says: “To what extent is your sales team adequately equipped to use this thought leadership material in conversations with prospects.”

When it comes to external communication we use the term leverage.  It is a cardinal thought leadership sin not to leverage your content in as many ways possible and across all your client or prospects touch points.

Customise your thought leadership

Finally customise your thought leadership as far as possible for each prospect and client.  Every senior person likes to think that your insights are written exclusively for them.  Ensure you modify your content for the different stages of the buying cycle – what you give a new prospect when you first meet them compared to when you have established a relationship with them should be very different.

A thought leadership methodology

#Thought Leadership Tweet concludes with a special addendum – a practical chapter with a step by step methodology on how to successfully plan, develop, communicate, evaluate and recalibrate your thought leadership campaign from start to finish.

We set out to write this book to make it easy for those new to the concept to understand what thought leadership is and how it works.  However it is also a valuable guide for sophisticated thought leaders to help them ensure they are covering all the bases and that their campaign is track.

If you have any questions on this or once you’ve read the book please feel free to contact either myself or my co-author Dr Liz Alexander.  We are more than happy to answer your questions.

#Thought Leadership Tweet covers the seven essential elements of a thought leadership campaign.  This post is the last in a series that covered:

1. Your guide to winning the content war and what is thought leadership? Covered in past post.
2. What does it take to become a thought leader? Covered in past post.
3. What impact do you want to achieve? Covered in past post.
4. How will you know you’ve succeeded? Covered in past post.
5. What space has already been claimed? Covered in past post.
6. What will be your unique point of view? Covered in past post.
7. What’s your communication strategy? Covered in this post.

Craig Badings is a director at Sydney-based, Cannings Corporate Communications.  He has consulted to companies small and large, listed and unlisted across Australia and South Africa about their communication strategies, corporate reputation and thought leadership.  He is the co-author of  #THOUGHT LEADERSHIP Tweet: 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign.  He published his first book in 2009: “Brand Stand: seven steps to thought leadership”

Join him on twitter @thoughtstrategy and on LinkedIn.

#Thought Leadership Tweet – What will be your unique point of view?

Thought leadership is about two key things: First, making sure your platform is client centric and goes to the heart of their issues or challenges and second, delivering new insights that anticipate, solve or lessen the effects of these challenges.
If you are able to achieve this you will be sought after by your clients and prospects.

Tweet #80 in the book #Thought Leadership Tweet sums this up: “What keeps your clients or prospects awake at night? Why? How can you use this to inform your thought leadership point of view?”

Critically to identify you unique point of view you need to be asking a lot of the right sort of questions. As tweet #85 says: “Thought leaders ask “why?” a lot more than what?” or “how?” Are you asking the questions from the start?”

First do the research

From experience, you should do your homework before embarking on your thought leadership journey. First identify what you are really good at, what great intellectual property do you have. Second does this or can this be adapted to answer/address your clients or your prospects issues/challenges.

Next identify whether anyone else already occupies this space. If so you may be two steps behind already. Thought leaders are always two steps ahead. Then research your market to gain an in depth understanding of their issues and possible solutions.

Thought leaders don’t play it safe

Look at some of the great thought leadership material out there: BMW’s Activate the Future, IBM’s Smarter Planet, McKinsey’s focus on the art and science of Management. It’s all new and ground-breaking stuff.

Being faint-hearted is not for thought leaders.

#Thought Leadership Tweet 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign covers the seven essential elements of a thought leadership campaign. I have covered off some of these in previous posts.

Already covered in this series:

1. Your guide to winning the content war and what is thought leadership? Covered in past post.
2. What does it take to become a thought leader? Covered in past post.
3. What impact do you want to achieve? Covered in past post.
4. How will you know you’ve succeeded? Covered in past post.
5. What space has already been claimed? Covered in past post.
6. What will be your unique point of view? Covered in this post.

Still to come:

7. What’s your communication strategy? Still to come…

Craig Badings is a director at Sydney-based, Cannings Corporate Communications. He has consulted to companies small and large, listed and unlisted across Australia and South Africa about their communication strategies, corporate reputation and thought leadership. He is the co-author of #THOUGHT LEADERSHIP Tweet: 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign. He published his first book in 2009: “Brand Stand: seven steps to thought leadership”

Join him on twitter @thoughtstrategy and on LinkedIn.

#Thought Leadership Tweet – how will you know you’ve succeeded?

One of the classic errors of a thought leadership campaign is a) not having campaign objectives clearly defined up front and b) not continually measuring and making informed adjustments to your campaign along the way.

The tweet prompts under this section in the book help you in your discussions around how best measure, evaluate and recalibrate your campaign.

The following tweets will give you an example:

Tweet number 54: “How do you plan to measure the internal (not just external) effects of your thought leadership campaign?”

Tweet number 56: “Have you created and communicated a detailed briefing document for all the parties involved, outlining expectations and deliverables?”

Finally be wary of measuring only the normal stuff like media coverage, speaking engagements and the like.  What you want to be measuring is the impact your campaign is having in steering clients and customers towards territory that will have major benefits for them and for you.

#Thought Leadership Tweet covers the seven essential elements of a thought leadership campaign.  I have covered off on some of these in previous posts but over the course of the next few weeks I will be adding to these in more detail.

1. Your guide to winning the content war and what is thought leadership? Covered in past post.
2. What does it take to become a thought leader? Covered in past post.
3. What impact do you want to achieve? Covered in past post.
4. How will you know you’ve succeeded? Covered in this post.
5. What space has already been claimed? Still to come…
6. What will be your unique point of view? Still to come…
7. What’s your communication strategy? Still to come…

Look out in the next few days for the next blog piece in this series covering #Thought Leadership Tweet which will touch on how to identify what space has been claimed.

Craig Badings is a director at Sydney-based, Cannings Corporate Communications.  He has consulted to companies small and large, listed and unlisted across Australia and South Africa about their communication strategies, corporate reputation and thought leadership.  He is the co-author of  #THOUGHT LEADERSHIP Tweet: 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign.  He published his first book in 2009: “Brand Stand: seven steps to thought leadership”

Join him on twitter @thoughtstrategy and on LinkedIn.

Visual interpretation of thought leadership

I found this great visual thought leadership map.  Check it out here  

It is a result of a panel recently held by Marketwire in Chicago as part of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) World Conference on the topic of building businesses with thought leadership.  It was presented by Marketwire’s senior vice president Tim Lambertus and consultant and journalist Mark Evans.

Great to see a different approach to capturing the elements that make up thought leadership.  While I would like to see a whole lot more added to this the key elements are all there.  Thanks guys.

I’m a director at Sydney-based, Cannings Corporate Communications. Check out my forthcoming co-authored  book #THOUGHT LEADERSHIP Tweet: 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign.

Or read my current book: Brand Stand: seven steps to thought leadership, follow me on twitter @thoughtstrategy or join me on LinkedIn.

Customisation – thought leadership’s next big thing

The next big thing in thought leadership is customisation.

In the space of a month I have heard from two different sources that clients are looking for customised thought leadership.

The first is Merryn Stewart who has spearheaded E&Y’s thought leadership efforts for four years and has been at the coalface of thought leadership for 15 years.  She is encouraging the E&Y partners to personalise their thought leadership material as much as possible.

The second is Fiona Czerniawska from Sourceforconsulting who in Issue 24 of her publication White Space, says that the evidence, after researching over 400 clients across Europe and the Middle East, shows that while they value thought leadership, they see a lot of it.

Fiona’s research highlights that what they really value is someone making a personal effort to tell them why they should read a particular piece of material.   They want someone to say: “Read this particular chapter/piece/article because it’s important to you and your business.” Or:  “Come to this event as we will be covering x, y and z which is of particular relevance to you right now.”

Think about how, where and to whom you send your thought leadership

What does customising your thought leadership mean?  For starters it means no longer producing content which you merely spray to as wide a market as possible and hope it has an impact.  It does mean thinking more strategically and carefully about to whom and how you send your thought leadership material, who it comes from and what personalised message can be attached to illustrate that an element/s of your material can help address one or more of their business challenges.

It’s important to show you understand the issues impacting their business and as a result why a particular piece or section of the thought leadership material you have produced is important to them.

Interestingly when Sourceforconsulting asked about the effectiveness of different ways of marketing, clients put thought leadership at the top alongside events and regular contact from someone they know in the firm.

In this 24/7 online world, it’s good to see that value is still attached to personal contact.

Are you customising your thought leadership or have you received a piece of customised thought leadership lately?  If so I’d love to hear from you about the impacts it has had on your clients or on you.

I’m a director at Sydney-based, Cannings Corporate Communications. Please check out my book: Brand Stand: seven steps to thought leadership, follow me on twitter @thoughtstrategy or join me on LinkedIn.

How not to launch your thought leadership

I felt like a pig snuffling for thought leadership truffles

I love thought leadership.  I love the direct, measurable impact it has on an audience, the great content it can generate, the debates
and discussions it frames, how it creates pre-eminence for a brand and how it engages businesses with their customers in ways they previously couldn’t.

But it has to be done properly.  So I question Bayer Cropscience’s launch of its thought leadership campaign www.connect.bayercropscience.us

Don’t get me wrong – it’s a great idea and I give them 10 out of 10 for wanting to facilitate discussion among the industry and the consumer around food, fuel, fiber and feed production trends and in so doing create greater advocacy for agriculture.

Pig snuffling for thought leadership truffles

When I read their press release I was excited.  I was excited to see how they had packaged it, what content they had and how they
would engage me.  Unfortunately my excitement I was a bit like a pig snuffling for thought leadership truffles and ending up with gruel.

Where were the questions to stimulate the debates? Where were the videos to spark discussion? Where were the papers or research to inform a point of view? Where were the faces – the experts from Bayer? Where did it tell me how I as a consumer can take part in this? Where was the flagging on their main website to guide me to their thought leadership page?

I battled and if you go on and you like it maybe I’m doing something wrong – please let me know.

Admittedly it’s recently been launched.  Maybe all the great stuff they talk about in their release is still coming but I now don’t
feel compelled to go back.

Hopefully they can prove me wrong over the coming months.  I want them to.  I want any thought leadership initiative to succeed.
Here’s hoping Bayer Crop Science’s does.

Craig Badings is a director at Cannings Corporate Communications in Sydney.  His views expressed here are his own.

He is the author of “Brand Stand: seven steps to thought leadership” and the blog www.thoughtleadershipstrategy.net/ You can follow him on ttwitter @thoughtstrategy or join him on LinkedIn.

PwC – your dream thought leadership job?

Could this be a dream thought leadership job?

A job offer that appears in The Times for a thought leadership manager at PwC is a great illustration of this.

In fact this alone should send a clear message to all those thought leadership naysayers that given the right resources, time, commitment and effort thought leadership works and delivers very real business value.  The PwC job is testimony to that.

Just take a look at some of the language they use in their advert to see what I mean: 

“One of the main elements of the role is to create and manage connections between various thought leadership teams and practitioners, and it offers a high level of exposure to what happens around the networks in the thought leadership arena, as well as to the network of thought leadership practitioners. The successful applicant will be reporting into the Director of Global Thought Leadership…”

I also like some of the bullet points in their role description:   

• Overall project management of the key milestones for the implementation of the global thought leadership strategy, including planning and development of internal communications
• Management of various thought leadership tools and major projects
• Set-up and management of the global thought leadership governance bodies
• Management of the thought leadership internal and external online presence
• Interim management of the CEO Survey in-depth interviews programme involving working with engagement teams and marketing/TL practitioners from different geographies and industries to source 20-25 CEO interviews
• Management of the thought leadership community
• Project management of selected thought leadership initiatives done in conjunction with the World Economic Forum

And among others the applicant will need:

• Bachelor degree in marketing/communications is essential, a Masters would be desirable
• A good grasp of thought leadership content and related issues
• Passion for thought leadership and understanding of its value in positioning the brand, creating client relationship and intellectual capital for the network
• Strong verbal and written communicating skills
• Strong track record in project management

Now that’s what I call a serious commitment to thought leadership at the highest level.  It sounds like the successful applicant is going to have a very fulfilling and rewarding career ahead of them.

May the best person win. 

The 9 fundamentals of thought leadership

The nine fundamentals to thought leadership

Here are the nine fundamentals to being a thought leader:

1.)    Research your target audience – identify the challenges and issues they face in their daily lives/businesses. This is the most important clue and driver of your thought leadership direction.

2.)    What do you want to be famous for? – Identify what area you want to own in your sector or industry. Focus on where your areas of expertise lie and analyse how you can you build an even deeper understanding backed by empirical data and always remember to focus it on your clients’ needs.

3.)    Scan your competitors – are they doing anything in that space? If they are, don’t bother competing rather find a new space you can own.

4.)    Deep dive – once you’ve identified the space you want to own it is important to go really deep into that area with evidence based research – opinions and using other people’s content certainly won’t cut it if you truly want to position yourself as a thought leader.

5.)    Set objectives and kpis for your campaign – it needs to support and underpin some solid business objectives and it needs to be measured so that improvements can b made and it can be recalibrated along the way.

6.)    Say something new – if you don’t your so-called thought leadership point of view will realistically only amount to another piece of content and there is a lot of content out there. This is about differentiating yourself from your competitors and positioning yourselves as the trusted advisors or ‘go to’ experts in your field.

7.)    Thought leadership champions – Identify and involve your thought leadership champions from the beginning – someone has to own this and act as your spokesperson and preferably someone senior so that you gain the business traction and senior backing you need in order for it to be a success.

8.)    Leverage and packaging – cleverly package your content across every touch point of your target audience and prospects.   There is a lot written about content management, content marketing, content curation.  Call it what you will, the point is read the material it will give you some good ideas on how to leverage your content and take it to market.

9.)    Make it part of your culture – there are many well known brands out there such as McKinsey, Deloitte, Booz & Company who have thought leadership ingrained in their culture.  They manage it as an important part of their business and the ROI on their thought leadership campaigns have been fantastic as a result.

Let me know if you have any other fundamental steps you think I should add.

Three key challenges facing thought leadership

After working in thought leadership for many years across multiple sectors, writing about it, researching it and speaking to a wide variety of people across a spectrum of industries, I believe the key challenges facing thought leaders or a thought leadership campaign boils down to three things:

1.       1. Thought leadership Engagement – are your senior leaders/executives engaged in your thought leadership position?

If not you will have a problem as the campaign is bound to be short-lived, it will miss the gravitas of senior commitment internally and externally, you will struggle to excite the target audiences for whom the thought leadership is intended, you will make limited inroads into making thought leadership part of the culture of your organisation and you will battle to convince your executives about the efficacy of thought leadership as a client and new business engagement strategy.

2.       Thought leadership Connectivity – is your thought leadership campaign enabling your key client-facing people to connect with their clients and prospects?  Did you include them in the journey?   Do they feel part of this campaign or is it content that is thrust upon them at the last minute and they have to make use of it? 

The risk to all of these questions that you can run the risk of your thought leadership material being perceived by your own people as ineffectual in helping them connect with your client or prospects resulting in them merely paying lip service to it at best and at worst not using it at all or dismissing it.

3.       Thought leadership Packaging – are you maximising the opportunity to leverage your content as much as possible across every possible client or new business touch point?  Have you researched your target audiences in terms of where they source their information, how they like to receive it, what they read, where they go online, whether they like face-to-face, etc?

These are critical questions that will guide you in deciding how you cut and dice your content for maximum effect.  Furthermore, and only if relevant, are you packaging your content online for maximum search engine optimisation so that a) people can find you, and b) you feature on page one of Google for those specific search terms?  

If you have any more to add to these I’d be delighted to hear from you.